Growth-Hacking Strategies for Startups

Leeyen Rogers
Jotform Stories
Published in
8 min readMar 11, 2015

Sean Ellis introduced the term “growth hacker” in July 2012. Since then, Google has indexed 32,700,000 pages on the subject and it has become a buzzword in tech marketing startup circles. But that doesn’t stop people from wondering what exactly growth hacking is, and how their companies can benefit from it. A mixture of product development, analytics, and engineering, growth hacking has the ultimate end goal of bringing in users. Regardless of what factors you weave into the marketing mix, if it builds a brand, it is marketing. It is the cheapest way of growing a startup, and you can hit the ground running with a budget of zero and just the internet at your disposal.

“Growth hacking is about leveraging the resources available to you, and finding creative solutions, some of which may never have been done before.”

Growth hackers must navigate the new and constantly changing landscape of marketing and social media. You need your initiatives to be trackable, scalable, and flexible — required assets in a world where new platforms get created every couple of months and those who don’t hop on the right train get left behind. You can have the most incredible, potentially transformative product, but it will never get even a single day in the sunshine if nobody else ever finds out about it.

Innovative marketing tactics helped drive the growth of DropBox, AirBnB, and Facebook into multi-billion dollar companies. Startups should be constantly on the lookout for new opportunities, including new platforms where they can ride on larger companies’ growth. Seek to be one of the first on an emerging and promising network. Opportunities can seemingly pop out of nowhere, and it pays to be an early adopter of a network on the rise.

“Being an early user on a social network can also help companies gain traction.”

During Pinterest’s initial growth phase, every user that signed up had to follow suggested Pinterest profiles of early users. These early adopters were picked up and suggested to a huge audience, gaining millions of followers with no work on their end. Though getting the chance to ride the coattails of another company’s booming growth is a rare opportunity, the payoff is enticing enough that exploring new avenues shouldn’t be ignored.

On a larger scale, StumbleUpon reaped the benefits of being one of the first plug-ins on the FireFox browser. Initially, FireFox ranked their plug-ins by downloads and being one of the first add-ons inadvertently gave StumbleUpon preferential treatment. That initial lucky push paved the way and helped StumbleUpon scale from a college apartment project to a web presence with over 15 million users.

“Marketing can drive demand, but growth hacking can help give people what they are already demanding.”

A product that solves problems is inherently successful, it just needs a chance to gain traction. PayPal piggybacked on eBay by offering them the solution to an issue that they were experiencing on the e-commerce platform. eBay initially ran their business on personal checks, and PayPal offered a superior payment method, both in security and convenience. Credit card companies were still developing a process to manage online fraud, while PayPal addressed the obstacle head on and took the risk upon itself.

Although PayPal had a high burn rate (shelling out a colossal $10 million a month in 2000) due to rampant online fraud, they were able to recover due to their substantial and expanding user base as well as the execution of a proactive strategy by the executive team. They adopted a multifaceted approach to combat the problem using a mix of financial, technological, and operational initiatives. The floodgates that were open to a host of fraudulent activities were closed and PayPal drove fraud away to other competing payment services. Another opportunistic way that PayPal employed growth hacking was through indirect referrals.

PayPal’s referral program is a legendary growth hack that catapulting their user base to over 100 million members, at a cost of $20 per member. A bold and purposeful move, they experienced 7 to 10% daily growth by giving away $10 to each refering user and $10 to each new user. Startups can utilize this strategy by giving their users an incentive to recommend, vouch for, and spread the word for them. You should test and modify what works the best for your audience, whether that be free shipping, a sign-up bonus, or free credit. The beauty of selling a software product is that it can scale really well, and giving out a free month subscription doesn’t have to cost a company anything yet can be enough to motivate referrals. PayPal users were able to send money to someone without an account, forcing them to open an account to claim their money, further contributing to PayPal’s virality.

“React swiftly to opportunity handed to you by your competition.”

JotForm, a popular online form builder, was inundated one day by support request from Adobe FormsCentral users. It was immediately realized that Adobe’s form building product, a lesser competitor to JotForm, had announced it was shutting down. JotForm wasted no time and geared up to onboard the thousands of users that were up for grabs as well as solve the FormsCentral user’s looming predicament that their forms and submissions were no longer going to be accessible.

From data collection to e-commerce, forms are crucial for so many companies. Re-creating forms on another platform would be a logistical nightmare and a time-sink for many businesses, so JotForm not only created a welcome page for FormsCentral users where they could import their forms, but they also successfully reverse engineered the FormsCentral interface to make the switch totally seamless. All that needed to be done to move their forms from FormsCentral to JotForm was entering their FormsCentral login information. When a competitor shuts down, seize the moment and create value for the displaced users.

Another way to drive growth while improving customer experience is to create a powerful closed-loop feedback system. All the data from the interaction of the product or service is captured and back back into the system to improve the overall customer experience. Lyft, an alternative cab company, has an exemplary closed-loop feedback system that works towards improving the experience for both the drivers and the passengers. All data points, from the time that a passenger takes to hop in the car after it arrives, to the rating that they assign to their drivers is computed and analyzed. This strategy of perpetual information flow and product enhancement is a superior alternative to an open-loop system where there is no continuous feedback and thus no direct metrics to assist in improvement, such as hailing a cab.

“[The job of a growth hacker is to] try a lot of ideas, ruthlessly optimizing successes and quickly discarding dead ends.” — Paul Rosania, Twitter Product manager

Incorporating A/B testing into your growth strategy can be a technique that can reap rewards very quickly, even with small tweaks and changes that seem insignificant at the time. The process includes testing ideas, analyzing which growth drivers to keep and which to cut. The faster this process can be repeated, the more likely it is that your startup will find scalable ways to grow. Testing and changing elements like copy text, layouts, images, and colors on your website or mobile app can give you remarkable results.

UpWorthy, a website for intentionally viral content, writes a minimum of 25 headlines per article then runs A/B tests: statistical hypothesis testing with two variants. The goal is to identify changes to web pages that increase or maximize an outcome of interest, which in Upworthy’s case is click-through rates. Through their testing and retesting process, Upworthy has helped maximize their potential for reach. Even the design and user experience of their social media sharing buttons has been A/B tested. They found that if the buttons have a hover effect when your mouse is over them, they could get 395% more shares. It was also discovered that the optimal time after landing on a page that the “like us” icon appeared was with a 16 second delay.

Even email marketing and other channels can benefit from A/B testing. Pick a defined outcome that is measurable and most relevant to your goals. This can be the number of sign-ups, number of sales, click through rates, conversions, etc. Test 2 groups of users (randomized or targeted according to your objective) and email them the same message with only 1 tweak at a time. For example, send group A an email with the subject line “Ends Wednesday!” Send Group B the same email with the subject line “Ending soon!” You can track open rates, click through rates, as well as sales (you can assign each email group a different promo code or unique tracking link). Take advantage of free tools, like Facebook and Google Analytics to help you determine what people are interacting with the most.

Use A/B and multivariate testing (in which myriad A/B tests essentially run simultaneously in as many combinations as possible) continuously to adapt and refine your message. It’s now the standard means through which startups and tech companies improve its websites and products. Startups are by nature able to be lean, agile, and fast-moving, and the course can be diverted to a better path even throughout a single day as ideas can be tested in real time with A/B testing. Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the behaviors of users on the default page. If the new version proves superior, it will displace the original; if the new version is inferior, it’s quietly phased out without most users ever seeing it. Google data scientists ran their first A/B test around 2000 to determine the optimum number of results to display on search engine results page, and since then tools have come a long way in helping facilitate A/B testing, such as Unbounce.

No discussion of growth hacking can be complete without touching on the popularly recognized examples from the likes of Hotmail and AirBnB. It seems like a distant memory, but in 1996 Hotmail successfully leveraged its free resource of existing customers: all 20,000 of them. They employed the simple strategy of adding a tagline, “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail”, at the end of each existing user’s outgoing mail. It quickly achieved staggering results: skyrocketing to over a million users within the first 6 months. The ubiquitous “Sent from my iPhone” message appears in all of our inboxes, speaking to the fact that companies are still finding value in this strategy.

AirBnB implemented a high-level technical solution that let them tap into Craigslist’s massive user base. Craigslist had the right target market for AirBnB: people who were looking for something other than the traditional hotel stay. Without a public API, AirBnB’s engineers built a brilliant bot that allowed users listing their properties on AirBnB to easily cross-post them to Craigslist in one click. The hack of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform is a window of opportunity only available in the very early stages of growth. The integration between the two sites is no longer, but the limited time was enough for AirBnB to climb their way into tens of millions of users.

“You may lack a budget or have limited seed funding, but you have ingenuity and creativity at your disposal.”

This is sometimes all that you need to propel your startup for success. With all hands on deck, both carefully tested and scrappy strategies can move the needle for you. Alex Schultz, VP of Growth for Facebook, explains that “if you’re a startup, you shouldn’t have a growth team. The whole company should be the growth team, the CEO should be head of growth.”

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Published in Jotform Stories

Stories from the founder of Jotform and other Jotformers…

Written by Leeyen Rogers

San Francisco based. Product Management @Rivian.

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?